Federal Rule

Sept. 22, 2006

The United States Constitution was never intended to put the federal government in charge of regulating the activities of the various states, much less the least details in the lives of ordinary Americans. Basically it has two purposes, which are to act as the arbiter of disagreements between the individual states, and to represent those states in the face of foreign challenges, whether economic, diplomatic, or military. Yet the federal leviathan, which grew far beyond its original intents, has become a vast collection of bureaucrats who have nothing better to do than justify their positions by imposing an escalating number of rules and regulations on a law abiding citizenry. The Federal Register is the daily publication for rules, proposed rules, and notices of Federal agencies and organizations, as well as executive orders and other presidential documents. The register presently consists of over seventy volumes, and is growing daily.

Interestingly enough, in 1790 the US population amounted to not quite 4 million people, with roughly one thousand of them being employed by the federal government. That’s about one quarter of one percent of the nations entire population. Nowdays, according to the US Census Bureau, about twenty million Americans were employed by federal, state, and local governments (excluding the armed forces) in 2003, the last year that I’ve been able to find figures for. That averages out to be roughly seven percent of the American population being government employees.

Twenty million government employees? What are they all doing? And more importantly, what are they costing the taxpayer? I’m reasonably sure that each and every one of them can readily justify his (or her) particular job. And I’m equally sure that a good many of those jobs aren’t really necessary either. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not down on the folks employed by the government, it’s just that I find it very hard to believe there are that many needful government positions to be filled! You might remember a few years back, when a congressional budget squabble “shut down” the federal government for a couple of days. The liberal media was quite indignant that two-hundred thousand government employees were temporarily laid off. I’ll bet those two-hundred thousand were working stiffs, and not overpaid brass hats and paper shufflers.

It’s a basic rule of management that in order to be a manager, one must have a number of subordinates. Therefore, it’s in the managers best interest to have a large number of people working under his direction, and the more subordinates he has, the higher his standing in the pecking order. Even, I suppose, if some of them aren’t doing much more than making coffee or sharpening pencils. Nor can a manager eliminate those unnecessary positions, as doing so might reduce the importance (and the budget) of his particular department, along with his lofty position in the bureaucratic hierarchy. Bureaucracies are self-sustaining organisms as well, and that brings us to the “Peter Principle”.

The Peter Principle was first introduced in a humoristic book describing the pitfalls of bureaucratic organization. The original principle states that “in a hierarchically structured administration, people tend to be promoted up to their level of incompetence.” The principle is based on the fact that in any organization, new employees typically start in the lower ranks, and when they prove to be competent in the task to which they are assigned, they get promoted to a higher level. This process of climbing up the promotional ladder can go on indefinitely until the individual finally reaches a position where he is no longer competent, and there his upward progress stops. Since the established rules of bureaucracy make it very difficult to "demote" someone to a lower rank, even if that person would be much better fitted in that lower position, most of the higher levels of a bureaucracy will be filled by incompetent people, who got there because they were quite good at doing a different task than the one they are now expected to handle. The principle applies equally to business, government, and politics.

All professions have a few people around that combine oversize egos with undersized talents, but no field of human endeavor boasts a greater percentage of such incompetents than political leadership. In sports, losing coaches get fired and failing players get cut. Business CEOs who lose money lose their jobs. Even in organized crime, low performers get whacked or imprisoned. So why do voters elect and even reelect incompetents? The Peter Principal is one reason… political leaders competent at low levels win election to jobs beyond their abilities. More importantly, political leaders face no bottom line - it's tough to measure their performance until it's too late to hold them accountable. Plus, politics is a team sport where the players support their side by making scapegoats of others. This enables savvy incompetents (in politics that's not an oxymoron) to blame bad outcomes on political enemies, the “other” political party, acts of God, anything except their own faulty decisions. All leaders will make occasional mistakes. Competent leaders learn from those mistakes and advance on up the political ladder, the incompetents don't, and remain in office seemingly forever. Perhaps we should consider term limits on a national basis? Competent people could be elected to the next higher office when their present term expires, while the incompetents could either be dropped completely, or elected to a lower position they’ve previously demonstrated they could handle.

That rather makes me wonder how most US Congressmen would fare.